Hearing-impaired individuals may benefit from communication systems and devices configured to provide assistance in order to communicate with other individuals over a communication network. For example, captioning services have been established to provide assistive services (e.g., text captions) to the hearing-impaired user communicating with a communication device (e.g., caption phone, caption enabled device, etc.) that is specifically configured to communicate with the captioning service.
For example, FIG. 1 illustrates a conventional communication system 100 configured to facilitate an assisted call between a hearing-impaired user 102 and a far-end user 104. The communication system 100 may include a first communication device 110, a second communication device 120, and a captioning service 130. The first communication device 110 and the second communication device 120 may be coupled together to facilitate communication therebetween via a first network 140. The first communication device 110 and the captioning service 130 may be coupled together to facilitate communication therebetween via a second network 150. For example, the first network 140 and the second network 150 may each be implemented according to the standards and bandwidth requirements of a communication network (e.g., Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN), cellular network, Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) networks, etc.).
The captioning service 130 may be a telecommunication assistive service, which is intended to permit a hearing-impaired person to utilize a communication network and assist their understanding of a conversation by providing text captions to supplement the voice conversation. The captioning service 130 may include an operator, referred to as a “call assistant,” who serves as a human intermediary between the hearing-impaired user 102 and the far-end user 104. During a captioning communication session, the call assistant may listen to the audio signal of the far-end user 104 and “revoice” the words of the far-end user 104 to a speech recognition computer program tuned to the voice of the call assistant. Text captions (also referred to as “captions”) may be generated by the speech recognition computer as a transcription of the audio signal of the far-end user 104, and then transmitted to the first communication device 110 being used by the hearing-impaired user 102. The first communication device 102 may then display the text captions while the hearing-impaired user 102 carries on a normal conversation with the far-end user 104. The text captions may allow the hearing-impaired user 102 to supplement the voice received from the far-end and confirm his or her understanding of the words spoken by the far-end user 104.
In a typical call, the first communication device 110 may include a device that is configured to assist the hearing-impaired user 102 in communicating with another individual (e.g., far-end user 104), while the second communication device 120 may comprise a conventional voice telephone (e.g., landline phone, cellular phone, smart phone, VoIP phone, etc.) without such abilities and without the capability to communicate with the captioning service 130. As a result, certain limitations have been appreciated by the inventors in the functionality of conventional captioning systems as will be discussed herein below.